Err, Agnostic?

"Does God exist?" is the wrong question.

If you answer yes, the world is one way.
If you answer no, the world is the exact same way. 

Verification: care to propose an experiment to tell the difference?

E.g. I can be sure Zeus doesn't exist because he's supposed to live on Olympus, and no satellite can see him. But the monotheistic God has no analogue.

Which means the only difference is how the belief makes you, personally, feel. Even, "I follow the Bible because I believe in God" is a non-sequiteur. The key spiritual truths in these books are equally untestable.

There's a reason they're all about 'faith' and it is because their founders weren't idiots. They knew they were, experimentally speaking, shovelling bullshit that nobody can prove or disprove. So they exploited the guilt-by-association fallacy in reverse.

Both atheism and theism are wrong, in exactly the same way both are wrong in a debate between someone who thinks green dreams sleep furiously and someone who thinks green dreams party sedately.

I Want to Change Through Learning

I feel late to the party here, but I just found the words to describe what I mean by 'education.'

What things would change how I act, if I knew them?
What would change my worldview if I knew them?

I am well educated when I know most of those things, out of the set of all things other people know.
This should, theoretically, barely warrant saying. Of course, when making a decision, I want all the relevant information. So, of course, I want to have handy all the relevant information for all decisions I regularly make. More generally, I want to reach the equilibrium, where I'm not likely to immediately change my habits just after an offhand comment by some random dude. [1]

However, these words made some facts plain to me, facts I don't see a whole lot of evidence of being known. (Or, I'd have thought, some random curmudgeon would have offhandedly mentioned them by now.)


First branch, there's some difficulties in becoming well educated.

Second branch, there's a striking contrast between what I want and things generally called 'education.'

A Good Education
The problem is unknown unknowns. Meta-education. It is hard to know about a thing I need to discover, without simply discovering it. The search relies on serendipity and inspiration.

I've approached this problem by looking at the frequency I discover new ideas and viewpoints, by aggressively neophilia, and by measuring how often Reality puzzles me or presents obstacles.

But that's the thing, isn't it? How do I know? How can I check that these measure are enough? I don't think I can. What would change how I search for knowledge, if I knew it? Nevertheless, they're what I've got and what I'm going to use.

At least the inevitable boasting about my education is falsifiable.
It's hard to ignore it when one's worldview is uncomfortable or stressed. Especially when I've consciously decided it doesn't have to be.
Unsatisfied neophilia is intrinsically punishing.
The frequency of new ideas is a simple number, and I can check 'new' by requiring myself to state where else I saw old ideas.

Even if all this is sorted out, there's the fact that what changes my decisions may not change someone else's. Education is necessarily individualistic and personal...though I also expect an awful lot of overlap.

To help balance my ongoing comments on Progressivism, I'll also say I expect roundly educated scholars to converge, even starting from different cultures. There's a clear best way of accomplishing most goals, and if you knew what it was and how to do it, why wouldn't you use it? A global intellectual elite is exactly what I would expect. (I just don't expect proggies to be any good at it.)


Also clarified, what I mean by 'uninteresting details.' Once I get chemistry, any further specific reactions are of no use, unless I want to be a professional chemist. Evolution entire fit neatly into the category of 'details' until evo psych and paleo diets hit the intertubes.

Notably, mathematics is often not details, for example the idea of 'orthogonal.' I just wish there was an actual school doing actual education, so I wouldn't have to waste time repeating arithmetic to convince the lecturer to start talking about generalized perpendicularity.

Speaking of schools...


I've Never Been in School
I went to a place called 'school.' And there were people called 'teachers' there. But I was certainly never taught anything there, except maybe a few details.

This isn't too surprising, in retrospect. It's well known that most are comfortable with confirmation bias, and only read or watch to support and validate their already-made decisions and worldview.

This is exactly the opposite of education.[2]

But since most prefer it, and this is nominally a democracy, I would expect public 'schools' to confirm that confirmation bias is okay. To be anti-education. And lo, so it is written...

Eliding most of my rant about school, I did learn that it is possible to blind the world to evil, and for a person to commit atrocities on children, then go home and think of themselves as a good person. I went to some of the best schools in my country, by the way. 'Academically' stellar.


Rant aside, I suspect that anti-education, ignorance, is in fact the correct decision for most. (Part of what lead me to concocting my theory of natural human castes.) My brain wants to out-group anyone who doesn't love knowledge per se, but it isn't necessarily cost-effective for non-scholars. My difficulty in accepting this suspicion is part of what lead me to my blog's title.

Which means that non-scholars should not only stay out of university, they should probably never go to an academic school at all. But, I'd be appeased with just an acknowledgement that the populations of G8 countries are not highly educated, no matter how many hours they've supposedly spent being taught. If they are more skilled, the cause almost certainly doesn't lie in the classroom. And that is perfectly fine.


[1] When I was a kid I noticed that I should preemptively do things the adult way, as it was generally better, which meant looking beyond my peers to find out what the adult way was.
Second, I want Alrenous:2020 edition to find the worldview of Alrenous:2012 not-retarded. Luckily, genuinely taking this approach to information all but guarantees it, because even if I do dramatically change, I know I couldn't have reasonably found it any sooner or easier. I can look only as well as I can look, which I'm doing. This has been tested first by anarcho-capitalism and then by Mencius Moldbug.

[2] Dishonourable mentions: ad campaigns, raising awareness, debates, journalism including most blogs, Khan Academy, almost all scientific papers. Learning non-details from these is like pulling teeth.

How To Prevent Trolley Solutions

A hopefully exhaustive tour of reasons the standard analysis makes solving the problem impossible.
(Spoilers: morality is binary, the trolley problem as normally stated is meaningless, letting die must be qualitatively different, and I think the only honest answer to the trolley problem is ignorance. I don't know, and neither do you, which means anyone who thinks they have an answer is wrong about something. It should be about playing God, which is a really tough problem.)

Spandrell put the trolley problem in front of me, and therefore I have to try to solve it again.
This is additionally a warm-up for the next post I'll write.

I started with a couple new-to-me thoughts, that it's about playing God and it's about deciding who deserves to live. I googled the former, to see how standard it was, but instead I found a superb illustration of the standard analysis. Which will hopefully help clarify my explanation of how broken the approach is.

"Does an assessment of whether some act is morally worse than another act, settle the question of what it is morally permissible for an agent to do?"

The offered answers: yes, no.
My answer: if your morality ever puts you in a position where you must choose the least-worst, your morality is broken.
I found this by asking myself, "What if morality is binary? Actions are wrong or not-wrong and there's no meaningful magnitude?" What if acts are either evil or not-evil and that's it for morality?

Put this way, it became clear to me that even if your morality does have gradations, it should approximately boil down to 'not do' and 'do.' If you choose the former, you're evil. If the latter, not. Which means every morality functionally reduces to binary morality.

Which means this whole question is meaningless - there is no such thing as morally worse.

Verification: put another way, neither circumstance nor human agency can be capable of forcing you to perform an evil act, because you cannot be held responsible for circumstance or other people. Therefore, there must always be a pure moral way out of any situation. If your morality disagrees, your morality is broken and you probably want to fix that.

So yes, it settles the question, it settles it as 'both are impermissible.'

"Important: You don't need to worry that if you respond "Yes" you're going to get caught out because of some trickery to do with bad consequences. In other words, if you respond "Yes", you're not going to get into difficulties because of thoughts about situations such as where inflicting more rather than less pain, for example, avoids some horrible outcome, because one can quite consistently argue that in such a situation inflicting less pain would be the morally worse action (and, therefore, to be avoided), precisely because it would have horrible consequences. "

Having said the above, this seriously revolts me. They were intuitively aware that they were asking a broken question, that they were engaged in sophistry, then salved their conscience by avoiding the real problem. That their analysis on the off-topic point is correct only makes it worse - they could have got the real analysis right.

Though I require myself to admit that avoiding this kind of sophistry can be difficult. I'd share but I want to minimize the tangent. Anyway, I demand that appointed philosophers know or figure it out without me having to explain.

"If you are confronted by a situation where you will inevitably cause pain, but you can choose whether it's a small amount or a large amount, then, it does rather seem as if the fact that it is morally worse to inflict a large amount of pain as opposed to a small amount (assuming it is a fact) settles what it is morally permissible to do - namely, only inflict a small amount of pain."

Err...no? If this quiz were a person they'd have earned a facepalm.

Your first problem is that, without coercion, you should never get into a situation where you must inevitably cause pain. And if you're coerced - by circumstance or another human - then morally it's all on their shoulders.

Second, they haven't established that inflicting pain is morally bad. Sure we generally agree - general agreement is not a proof. 'Rather seem' is not a proof! We could all be wrong. That's indeed the point. We don't understand the trolley problem. We must be wrong about something. The issue may well lie in the morality of inflicting pain.

Although I didn't find anything when I checked pain per se, I did find a problem with the word 'inflict.' As the trolley problem is identical here, I'll hold off and do them both at once.

"Is killing five innocent people morally worse than killing one innocent person?"

I quote this to note that 'kill' has the same problem as 'inflict.'

"Without these organs, his five patients will definitely die; or, to put this another way, it will turn out [the surgeon accidentally] killed them by administering the chemical."

Depends on whether you think this is negligence or luck. I, at least, can't prove it either way.

"Assuming (a) that the backpacker doesn't consent to giving up his life to save five other people, (b) that the lives of the five people will be saved if, and only if, the organs are transplanted, and (c) that nobody will ever find out what the surgeon has done, is it morally permissible for the surgeon to take matters into his own hands, and operate?"

Is murder ever morally permissible? No.
But that's the question, isn't it? Is it murder to coerce someone out of their life to save other lives which are at risk through no fault of their own?

"An interesting thing about this class of killings is that in particular circumstances it represents a challenge to what most people will take to be a moral rule that killing more people is worse than killing fewer people. "

That's not the rule. This is formal equivocation.
The rule is murder is always wrong.
But letting die can't be wrong. This can be proven by taking the limit. Kel thinks that

"Yet isn't walking away from making a choice, making a choice? Choosing not to pull the lever when you had the power to do otherwise is making a decision that would kill 5. If you could have done otherwise, you're responsible either way."

So you must save a child from a burning building, at the cost of your dog.

But where does this end? I could (I'm told) save a child's life in Africa by paying for their food. Am I responsible for their death?

I could also train myself in firearms and patrol the streets of the Bronx, defending the innocent. Am I responsible for those murders, because I choose not to?
Perhaps I could save yet others, but I don't know how. Am I negligent for not aggressively searching out these methods and victims?

Take the limit, you find it's absurd. Where's the line? What is the qualitative moral difference between saving someone emotionally nearby and someone emotionally distant? By this logic, I'm responsible for just about everything. (Especially in the minds of those who think I could start a social movement and change the world.)

Take the limit, and I'm God. So are you. We're all fully responsible for everything. This logic sucks and I'm taking it back to the store.

"It seems, then, that the proposition that killing more people is morally worse than killing fewer people must be false."

And indeed it is. Because of the equivocation.
At first, 'kill' is used as 'murder.' Obviously doing more wrong can't be better than doing less wrong.
Perhaps this would be best explained by reversing the moral valence. So let's multiply by negative one...

"Is it more wrong to euthanize five innocent, consenting agents, or to euthanize one innocent, consenting agent?"

Answer: it depends on whether you think euthanasia is murder or not, doesn't it?
And so the trolley problem - or the murderous surgeon problem - entirely depends on whether you think intentionally killing someone is sufficient to define murder.

But that's exactly the problem the trolley is supposed to address.

Principle: self-referencing statements are invalid. Either they converge, which means they're circular and thus meaningless, or they don't converge, in which case they're paradox, and thus meaningless.

Or equivalently, inflicting pain and being responsible for the pain inflicted are different. The question under consideration is which it is.

Luckily the trolley can be righted, and put back on its tracks by making it about something else. It seems to me that most honest victims of the problem try to do that.
Kel, for example, tries to make it about whether refraining from action makes you responsible. This, at least, is an answerable problem.
I've seen it transferred to a problem about the worth of human lives. Again, very answerable.
I think a better one is the playing God angle. If you're at the trolley, or you're a surgeon, you decide who lives and who dies. Which means you should, by definition, let live who deserves to live.[1] But doesn't that make it clear that mere innocence cannot be the sole consideration? If they're innocent, all six deserve to live. This is what makes it playing God.

The playing God problem is hard. I can't even find an entry on it.

Luckily, in real life the playing God situation is very rare. The moral solution, as I mentioned previously, is simply to not get into that situation in the first place. Nevertheless, through mistake or luck, it does occur. As a practical matter, some humans must play God. It is therefore necessary for the philosopher to at least look for a solution.

I like the surgeon formulation, because the trolley people are faceless and thus seem identical in character. The surgeon has patients and a backpacker, giving some hint of personality. Which makes clear that the world will be very different, depending on who the surgeon kills. Humans aren't fungible. To take the limit, what if the five patients are all Down's victims and the backpacker is Norman Borlaug? (Assuming Norman's legend somewhat matches his actual actions.) Thing is, there's no reasonable way to know.

I suppose you could play statistics, and say they all have an equal chance at being Borlaug, as far as the surgeon knows. But as long as you're playing statistics, then I might find that cultures that let the surgeon kill the backpacker have more killings than cultures that call it murder.

More importantly, I may be able to show a logical contradiction in one of those rule sets...


[1] This is true even if 'deserve' is meaningless, which I think is a reasonable response. Let it not be said I also ask broken questions. If deserve is meaningless, no-one deserves to live. Or to die. The entire problem is rendered meaningless. That said I still want a thing which plays the role of 'deserve' and I'll invent it if I can't find it.

Notes on Kling's PSST

Overall I don't think the Kling's theory (HT) is difficult enough to warrant all these words. Using that many suggests there's more to the idea than there actually is.
Being blunt, I praise it with faint damn. Yes, good work, you get to paste your name on this idea.

To confirm, I read it as: when technology shifts what jobs are profitable, it takes time for the people that make up the market to figure out the new stable equilibrium.[1]


In the real world, money is the only tool we have for measuring wealth. But when evaluating a theory, I can posit a non-recursive wealth measurement device, assume some concrete examples, and then see if the theory is correctly describing wealth dynamics.

"That is, unemployment can be blamed on an increase in the
demand for savings in the form of money, which does not require production."

I understand this argument as; people get thrown of out of work because others divert money from buying their stuff, so less stuff is demanded and fewer need to work to make it.
Loading up the wealth-analysis program, this becomes immediately, obviously false, because it is conflating wealth and the measurement of wealth. The logic is exactly as confused as saying the price of real estate went down because people wanted fewer metre sticks.

Verification one: imagine substituting my magic wealth-measure for money. Also suppose mouse-makers are losing work because people are saving rather than buying fancy new mice.
The mouse-makers want to sell mice so they can buy food. However, no physical input of either the mouse-maker or the buyer has changed. The raw resources, including labour, is all still there. There is no physical reason the mouse-maker cannot go on eating. Nor any reason the saver can't go on getting new mice.

Verification two: with money being stashed away, the same number of goods are demanding less money, leading to an increase in the price of money: deflation. The system's feedback automatically balances the supply of labour and the supply of goods, as long as the supply of the tracking instrument, money, doesn't change too rapidly.

In other words, the exact same stuff is demanded, but at a lower price. As long as the system has time to propagate the decrease, it won't be a problem.

Verification three: saving money is just a way of keeping score. It says; "Society owes me wealth in the future, because I forwent wealth in the present."
Sure, at first it looks like this will indeed reduce aggregate demand. However, it must be matched by a later increase in demand. More importantly, it is matching a previous savings, and increase in demand. For each yuppie who recognizes the value of a nest egg, there's a proportional old rural retiree who wants a new mouse. Again, as long as the shock isn't too large, the system automatically balances itself.

In short, no matter how I look at it, I can't find a stable mechanism for savings to be a bad thing. Turns out prudence is an unambiguous virtue. (Outrageous, I know.)

"Another approach is to suggest that wage rates can get stuck too high, leading firms to cut back on employment and output."

On the other hand, I have to agree with this. If wages get stuck, then you have a problem with prices and your economy will get sick, though I wouldn't be so bold as to so glibly assume the mechanics without first examining the feedbacks.

"when the rate of saving goes up, businesses do not invest to increase capacity in future output, but instead base their investment plans on what Keynes called “animal spirits.”"

[1]Now here's every reason I think I think Kling will have trouble coming up with further correct ideas.

This sophistry interests me, because it almost worked on me. It gives the impression that the whole paragraph is describing Keynesian thought, by the method of leaving all but one approach unattributed. However, I realized don't know for sure that the others are Keynesian, (though it seems likely) and Kling has plausible deniability in case they're not.

So...is it obvious that to use sophistry is self-destructive, even to imply true things? Though I don't blame Kling, sophistry is infectious and our culture is soaking in it.

"Each of these approaches to explaining aggregate excess supply is vulnerable on conceptual and empirical grounds. These issues of Keynesian macroeconomics were the topic of intense debate in the 1970s and 1980s."

It's for things like this that I perform my own analysis on the spot. Looks like Kling thinks I got the right answers: it is all Keynsianism, and it is all theoretically bunk. As a bonus, Kling believes the experiments back that up, and I'm willing to trust him on that.

Also it is a warm up for analyzing Kling's upcoming offering, and by explicitly working it out, it will help me recognize relevant details and distinctions

"Suppose that we had with us a time traveler from 1800.
Imagine taking a random sample of a dozen people working in different office
buildings and trying to explain to our time traveler how those people contribute
to the production process. Try to convey the role of a web programmer, a graphic
designer, a data analyst, or a social media marketing specialist."

Well, guys, I might secretly be from 1800. I'm not sure that those people aren't wasting resources.

For example, the designer makes prettier packages so that more of that stuff gets bought. Would voters have done without, if the packages were plain? Would they have been just as happy?


I am reminded that newer ideas aren't as well understood as older ones. It is likely that in the future, Kling will be able to usefully summarize PSST in one line just as he summarized various Keynesianisms.

"The PSST interpretation of the Great Depression in the United States would be that the internal combustion engine and the small electric motor disrupted patterns of specialization and trade."

If Kling were not a paid, 'respectable' economist, would he have included the dominating role of government in his analysis?
Does he omit it due to prudence, or due to actual lack of belief? In the latter case, if it were not in his professional interest, would he believe?

"The high school graduation rate was only 29 percent in 1931, but it had reached 59 percent by 1950."

I doubt I'll ever believe high school in fact causes skilled workers, for the unavoidable datum that I certainly didn't learn anything. The correlation is caused by the opposite causation. Future skilled workers more easily jump though the high school hoops.

I suppose a double-blind controlled trial - with replication, naturally - could change my mind. I expect to see the reverse result, though.

Come to think, this is like non-destructive quantum measurement. Because school doesn't do anything, academically speaking, you can be certain that it will never be tested. Just as you can be certain a puppy is there, as you never pull back a quantum steak.

The ones in the best position to perform a test are also in the best epistemic position without the test. If it would work, they would likely have already done it and crowed it from the rooftops.

On the contrary, what do you suppose would happen if you got to have (salad) lunch with the minister of education, and try to convince them to do controlled trials on education methods?

That said, it accomplishes Kling's goal upon his intended audience.

"The slump was a mistake, caused by bad luck and, above
all, by incompetent macroeconomic management."

Aware of government's possible role, but dismisses it entirely? That's...not good.

"On the other hand, could the patterns of specialization and trade in 1950 have been adopted sooner? [...] Even with such foresight, the patterns in 1950 depended on developments, such as road and highway construction as well as a more educated labour force, that were not in place in 1929."

Which means they can't have yet made previous patterns unsustainable, and thus can't be causing unemployment.


I suspect my most serious criticism is here:

"From a PSST perspective, one has to ask how full employment could have been maintained."

It doesn't need to be maintained.

It bears repeating: the ultimate goal is for everyone to be a Patrician and not have to work at all.

If fewer need to work to get the make the same stuff, unemployment isn't a problem, it's mission accomplished.

The solution is to substitute working time for leisure time. If unemployment goes from 0% to 20%, but the same stuff is made, the equilibrium is for everyone who wants to work to work 36 hours a week instead of 40, but get paid the same in terms of stuff.

There's an obvious bias that in principle should cause (all?) economists to neglect that leisure is superior to employment.
What actually happens when productivity per worker goes up 20%, is that the government raises taxes by a proportionate 20%, so that the workers still work 40 hours, make 20% more stuff but are paid the same in terms of stuff.

(Well, workers capture a fraction of the benefit - houses are bigger now, for example. Just not most of it.)

"I think that this would be a more damning criticism of PSST if the AS-AD approach were better established at predicting and controlling fluctuations in employment. However, the AS-AD approach does not produce reliable predictions of macroeconomic performance."

I agree. AS-AD is a lower bound on the usefulness of PSST.

However, the Austrians have an explanation. Unfortunately, the explanation fits neatly into Kling's governmental blind spot, and so he doesn't even see the need to dismiss it, let alone refute it.

It's doubly a shame because it also fits neatly with PSST. Subsidized debt leads to unsustainable patterns of trade. Which are then unsustained. Government doesn't learn, and returns to subsidizing debt. One business cycle for you, sir.

Again, using my magic wealth-measure: assume that prices in a freeish market economy do well enough at approximating wealth; then perturb the system by artificially lowering the price of cash; many ventures that are negative in terms of real stuff are now profitable in terms of dollars. This cannot possibly be sustained, as you run out of spare physical stuff to pour into the wealth furnace. The fire produces lots of GDP in the form of heat, but almost no light. Then the voters employed in shovelling coal for the train to nowhere get thrown out of work.

"Another difference was that the most recent recessions were followed by “jobless recoveries,” in which GDP returned to its previous peak long before the unemployment rate. [...] The “jobless recovery” represents a divergence between the path of output, as measured by GDP, and the path of employment."

I agree that this matches PSST theory.

It also matches my theory of government eating surpluses. GDP goes up, but voters cannot afford as much stuff, assuming employment is a good proxy for distribution of wealth. Where is all the stuff going?

This is where, if you're Kling, you should watch for confirmation bias. While the data matches PSST theory and therefore Kling can comfortably believe it if he so desires, a more diligent reading must ask; what else can explain this? Of these options, which interpretation puts my theory in the worst light? Does this worst case fit the data better than PSST?

Or, if you're me; is employment really a good proxy for wealth distribution? Where is all that stuff actually going? It may be going to voters. I'll have to check.

But the fact is I've repeatedly and antecedently noticed a legislative blind spot in Kling, one that moreover matches a blind spot I've repeatedly noticed in other professional economists. This is what I'd have predicted had I bothered to do so. I'm confident that he hasn't analyzed this possibility. Since I've analyzed both possibilities and he analyzed one, I'm in an epistemically superior position.

Still, this isn't an immutable advantage. Kling has shown willingness to take these things seriously when they're put in front on him.

"In the years leading up to the financial crisis, both the United States and the United Kingdom experienced expansions in finance, residential real estate, and government services. However, not all of the jobs were sustainable"

So close!

"The growth in finance reflected an excess of risk taking made profitable by misguided regulatory guidelines more than an increase in actual value added in that sector. [...] In this context, government spending is not likely to solve the problem."

But, definitely not actually getting there. Again, not a good sign. It seems Kling intuitively understands that government is a big issue, but won't consciously admit analysis of it.


Having written all that, I challenge myself to see if I really believe it. When I run across relevant data, does it make sense, or does it make me look the fool?

Antibiotic Resistance, the Anarchist Solution

Coercive, government-legitimizing beliefs and thoughts are habit forming. It often stops the addict from seeing easy solutions.

"Tighter controls on prescriptions, or a tax on antibiotics, might address the conservation problem."
[...]
"If the market doesn’t work, why not try the government?

Even many libertarian types agree that the commons problem seems to call for stronger state controls over antibiotics." (Pathway.)

Principle: the market is smarter than you. Smarter than me, too, but in this case I apparently don't have to be that smart. Solving the conservation problem is straightforward.

Solution in 50 words or less:
First, make sure its health insurance, not healthcare insurance. The insurer should pay up whenever the customer gets sick. (How does this [ctrl-f "Stanford"] happen without collusion from the insurance companies?)

Next, sell the rights to antibiotics, wholesale, to the insurer. They decide who gets what chemical, when, and how much.

Verification:
The insurer has a a short-term financial incentive to use the antiobiotics, and long-term incentive to see that they still work later. The drug firms don't have to take on the market risk at all, but have an incentive to produce any chemical the insurers will buy. The insurers have an incentive to buy new chemicals that work, but only to use the cheapest that will work, and have the resources to professionally check that they work.

It aligns incentives for cooperation with the patient, all the way down the board. (Except the government, which sees an opportunity for overreach disappear.)


However, there is a flaw here; the third world.

"Laxminarayan likens antibiotics resistance to global warming: every country needs to solve its own problems and cooperate—but if it doesn’t, we all suffer. Coordinating a global response will require years, even decades; any serious revision to the patent system might have to go through the World Trade Organization."

They don't care about our insurance companies, and it's pretty easy to copy an existing drug. Resistance could develop there and then spread to here.
There's a straightforward non-combat solution, in globalizing the market better. This can't help in time, but is a nice illustration of how (principle:) past coercion destroys future non-coercive solutions, which implies that it is still worth ending current coercion to prevent this kind of thing from happening again.

Note, however, that all the solutions McArdle mentions have the exact same problem. (Are there any problems that markets have and governments don't? It seems unlikely in principle; they're both staffed by human beings.)

"The longer we ignore our problem, as Orwell did, the more likely we are to share his fate."

Who's 'we'? I'm on board with solving antibiotic resistance. By how much does that increase the odds that the problem will be solved, do you estimate?

Discovery and Verification of a Specific Epistemic Technique

I am discussing induction with Aretae and discovered - among other things - that my beliefs about the physical process of induction is consistent with my definition of intelligence.[1] It is a win-win-win situation. Also, two of the wins should be achievable through conscious effort, which means you can do this too, if I can figure out how I did it in the first place. It may even be automatic, which implies it is especially reliable.

Later this post switches to new discovery mode.[2]

I suppose I should think of a name for it, but it's a bit early as I don't know which one it will be.

If I'm wrong, it means my beliefs are being made consistent without conscious effort. It would mean they'll all shift if I find my mistake, without me having to spend any further effort. Verification: calculate the odds of two independent mistakes being made exactly the same.

If I'm right, either the beliefs are related or independent.

If they are dependent, it means I'm deriving new true things without conscious effort from previous facts. Verification: similar odds calculation as above.
If they are independent, it represents independent corroboration, and thus self-verification; based on the odds of a falsity appearing exactly consistent with a separate truth.


The next step is to get use out of this by figuring out which it is. If I'm wrong, in due course reality should kick me in the teeth either about induction or about my definition of intelligence.[1]

If I'm right, the possibilities can be distinguished by intentionally trying to use one of the resulting techniques. If I try to exploit automatic consistency generation, what happens? Do I get somewhere or do I get trash?

My present plan to to try these in order.

For completeness, I'll mention that the first time I try to exploit it for correcting false beliefs, I will do a manual re-check of all related beliefs. Problem is I'm running out of verifiably mistaken beliefs, as I've plucked all the low hanging fruit. There's the Higgs, (Via.) but I don't believe much that hinges on the Higgs...


[2]Wait. It's time to change this post to (approximate) stream of consciousness.

Thinking about the Higgs, I now have a new plan. I realized I'm wrong; I believe in the Higgs because I like the general relativity description of gravity as the curvature of space itself. You shouldn't need a particle to couple particles to space - it would mean the Higgs either was recursive or has no position.
If my beliefs are usually being logically coupled without conscious intervention, changing my mind about the Higgs should change my mind about GR without conscious thought. Historically, this has not been the case. Rather, I just get a flag next time I think about GR, reminding me about the Higgs. (And screwing up whatever I was about to say.)

Which means two independent beliefs are reinforcing each other. Neat. Verification: I'm waiting on the Higgs verification anyway; what they discover about the putative Higgs should be consistent with what they have previous said about Higgs. If not, it calls the entire model into question, and I go back to being happy with GR.

It doesn't even matter if my logic about GR is correct or not, it will verify the technique either way.

If Higgs is confirmed, I'll do what I have to accept it, then simply wait. How I feel about GR will either change on its own, or it won't - getting around the fact that I'll naturally remember to think about it, at least a little bit, now it has occurred to me.
If the Higgs turns out badly, I'll use the fallback plan.


[1] Intelligence, as commonly considered, is the conflation of three processes. Learning, creativity, and reasoning. This spans the space of everything you can do to bits; record them, generate them, and manipulate them. I believe they're implemented independently, at least in the brain.

Understanding Consciousness?

The ideal philosophical proof is short, perfectly clear, in plain language, grammatically simple, logically sound, logically novel, minimizes assumptions, and addresses human-scale meaning and consequence. If you cannot explain your philosophy thusly, you do not understand it well.

So try this; consciousness != physical in one paragraph:


When you see a mountain, you can't be mistaken about perceiving a mountain, by sheer law of identity. If the perception of a mountain were objective, others would be able to verify it - and also be mistaken. If it were inherently objective, it would be objective to you, too. You cannot be mistaken, so it is not objective, so it is not physical.